Design Leadership Thinking

In my product design alumni email group, we had a robust discussion on the MIT article critiquing Design Thinking. We had many great perspectives reflecting on the article and how challenging it was to work through any design process to execution.

Making great products is hard. The key for me is moving from Design Thinking to Design Leadership Thinking.

It is not a failure of Design Thinking as the reason for lack of impact, it's the challenge of setting up Design Leadership for success. We should focus on how we can empower design leaders to foster and build a design culture in their organization that generates better customer and business outcomes. A design culture where we place humans at the center to balance the business and technology agenda. Making sure we create a values based culture with a shared purpose to work towards a common goal.

The Design Leadership Thinking that has helped guide my career was based on key principles that incorporated Design Thinking into building a stronger design culture. The principles were;

Create Clarity

As design leader we employ different processes and techniques in our toolbox like Design Thinking to help us navigate through ambiguity. Making design decision is critical and a focus on customers creates clarity that unlocks the team's potential and prioritizes our work towards achieving common goals.

Generating Energy

Our super power as design leaders is our ability to generate the What If. To build the narrative, the story of where we can go. But it shouldn’t be blind optimism, we also need to create the energy and the grit to work through tough challenges. When things aren’t going well, recognize your team's contributions and progress, then help unblock the path, and find a different way.

Deliver Success

More and more of our work is a continuous cycle of experimentation and learning. Going from thinking to making, is not any one mode or process, it's a collective effort of orchestration to transition your customer towards better solutions. Design leaders need to define success and set the bar, what is the impact we want to make.

Lots more to unpack on Design Leadership Thinking. Looking beyond the here and now, how will Design Leadership evolve in this new era??

For more history and formal critique of Design Thinking, here’s a great article from Dr. Jan Michel A. , executive director at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University.